


Days Dawning; Pure Morning (a friend in need's a friend indeed)

by hishn_greywalker



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Stanford Era, outside pov, spn_outsidepov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-05
Updated: 2007-03-05
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hishn_greywalker/pseuds/hishn_greywalker
Summary: Sam never said anything about what he did, so he didn't say anything about what Sam did. - Sam's college roommate, who did notice that Sam stole the salt shakers from the dining hall, among other things.





	Days Dawning; Pure Morning (a friend in need's a friend indeed)

**Author's Note:**

> title from Placebo. For [](http://spn-outsidepov.livejournal.com/profile)[spn_outsidepov](http://spn-outsidepov.livejournal.com/)'s [[fic-a-thon](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_outsidepov/1229.html)]. Mentions of drug use (just weed, kiddies, and it's not Sam). Told from the perspective of an oddly naïve suburbs kid. I imagined the friend from the pilot, but really, doesn't matter who it is.

So the thing about Steve is that he's not an idiot. He made it in to Stanford for christsakes and his Dad didn't pay anyone for him to get there. In fact he really wouldn't have been surprised if his Dad hadn't paid people to keep him out so he'd go to UW instead, but Steve had had is sights set on Stanford for a long time.

It's where his Mom had gone, after all.

But that wasn't really the point. The point was, he wasn't an idiot, and he was a BioChem major. He could observe and he could log things without writing it down and he could remember things.

That said, he was pretty much your typical suburban teenager from Seattle. He'd grown up in a good neighborhood with his little sister and his older brother and his cousins all lived within 30 minutes of them and all his grandparents were alive. His mother had died when his sister was two and their dad had never remarried, but otherwise Steve's childhood was just like every one of the 500 kids he graduated with. Just because 30% of them would never go to college didn't mean the other 70% weren't going to do huge things.

So his roommate? Yeah, Sam Winchester wasn't like anything he'd ever had to come across.

To begin with, he showed up with a duffle and leather messenger bag that looked as if it had been used in the Pony Express. Over the course of the time they roomed together, it got cleaned up, but it was still ancient and Steve didn't want to know where he'd gotten something like that.

He'd expected more stuff to come with someone – a friend, a family member – or by mail, once he'd found out that Sam had taken the bus to the school (he left the ticket on the desk). When two weeks had gone by and nothing had come, Steve had started to wonder if Sam had run away or something.

The next thing he noticed was that Sam was freakishly smart. Smart like the kid in his class in high school who'd gotten a 4.0 and 5s on every AP test he'd taken (nearly ever one he could) and was going to Yale now. When he found out, months later, that Sam had gotten a full ride, he couldn't say he was surprised. If anyone else had seen how the kid took books apart, how well he could research and the facts that he could weed from books that sounded like crap to the rest of the world, they wouldn't have been surprised either.

After a while Steve started to notice that Sam deferred verbally to anyone who was any sort of authority without thinking even though in action he mostly ignored what they said. Steve was in three classes with him that first year (two the first semester and one the second) and he was convinced Sam knew more than any of the TA's did, and they were supposed to be grad students. He often wondered if Sam ever went and saw the professors, and if he did, if he knew more than they did too.

It didn't take very long for Steve to notice his idiosyncrasies, either. And man did Sam have some weird habits. Like the salt, to begin with. He didn't steal the salt the whole time they were there, but in the beginning he did. Later on, he bought his own. And it wasn't like he threw a pinch over his shoulder every now and then. No, Sam? Sam stole whole salt shakers and dumped the whole thing in corners and under the carpet across their door and all along the window sill. At first Steve had tried to clean it up, but after a few weeks he'd given up. The RA didn't seem to care and even though Sam never said anything – in fact he seemed determined not to – he looked like he was getting tired of stealing salt shakers.

He also liked to write runes on their walls, windows and doors. He used water a lot of the time – Steve often joked to himself that it was holy water, but later on he wondered how much of a joke that was – and glass calk for the windows. They were cool looks runes, and when he looked them up he found out they were protective symbols. He never touched them, more because he didn't really want to have the salt fight all over again.

There were some things he noticed that he knew Sam didn't do. Like, how he knew he hadn't rented the mini fridge and he knew Sam hadn't. He never told Sam he hadn't, and he knew Sam thought he had, but he had a feeling that the kid who came and stood off, shadowing Sam once or twice a month was the guy who had done it. And when they needed money for lab equipment that Sam's full ride didn't cover, the envelope with the bill had been stuck in a second one addressed to him and there was enough cash to cover both his and Sam's with a note that told him to pay it for them.

He figured the money for his was to buy his silence, so he never said anything. Plus the kid drove a sweet looking '67 Impala, and you probably didn't want to piss off someone who drove that kind of car.

Over the course of that first year he also learned that Sam was also, to top it all off, a genius at pool. It wasn't in a calculated way, like him, where he had to look for all the right angles and make sure it was the best shot. Sam could just glance across the table and know exactly where and how he needed to take his shot.

He was like that with a lot of thing. Like people, for instance. Sam was a giant, and just about everyone thought twice about taking on giants. But even those who didn't never once made Sam blink and the one time he and Sam got into a fight Steve didn't really have to do anything but watch as Sam took care of the other guys with an efficiency that scared him.

The one thing that Steve tried to never think about was the knife – and he didn't know if you really called something like that a knife, since it was this wicked look curved blade that looked like it was custom made to Sam's hand (after looking up the designer, so found by googling the name etched into the blade, he'd found out all he did was custom work, so it made sense). And then there was the gun Sam probably never thought about, tucked away on the bottom of the box spring just within Sam's long reach.

But whatever.

The really awesome thing about Sam though, was that he could tell Steve if he was getting good weed or shitty stuff without really having to look. He'd found it out not too long after they'd become roommates when Sam had told him he'd been conned good and that what he had was diluted pretty badly with oregano.

Steve could see the look in Sam's eye, the one that wondered how he hadn't known (or why he hadn't looked when he bought it). Steven hadn't had to say anything for Sam to know he hadn't done much with drugs before he'd come here – he'd been too focused on getting the hell out.

After that, even though Sam never touched the stuff, Sam went with him when he bought. Even after Steve had learned exactly what he wanted and how to make sure he was getting it, Sam still came along. Everyone assumed they bought it together and smoked it together, and neither of them ever corrected anyone.

Steve didn't figure it out for a long time, but Sam could identify most spices and herbs by smell or texture or sight, and it hadn't been marijuana that Sam had known, but the oregano.

But Steve wasn't an idiot so even after he figured it out, he never said anything, and since Sam was so willing to help him out he never said anything about the salt or the weapons or the runes, or even the kid who shadowed Sam so often.

It would be a couple of years before he'd figure out the shadow had been his older brother. It made even more sense when he found out his older brother was named Dean, as that was who Sam called out for during every one of his all too frequent and all too horrific nightmares. By then the world thought of them as murders and bank robbers, psychopaths who killed everything in their paths.

Somehow, Steve had trouble putting the Sam Winchester the media portrayed and the Sam Winchester he'd roomed with for two years together. He always wondered whether Sam still put salt on all the window sills and in front of all the doors and if maybe the FBI could track them across the country that way, but since Sam never said anything to anyone about him, Steve kept his mouth shut too.  



End file.
